The Everlasting Empire Read Online Free PDF Page B

Warring States period, legitimating the universal empire long before it came into being.
    The pro-unification discourse of the Warring States period developed gradually, with early voices being somewhat hesitant. Thus Confucius (551–479 BCE), the earliest and arguably the most prominent thinker of the preimperial age, proposed curbing political disintegration by restoring the early Zhou system, in which “rites, music, and punitive expeditions” were initiated by the Son of Heaven and not by regional lords. 15 Confucius’s later intellectual rival, Mozi (ca. 460–390 BCE), embedded his vision of unity even more deeply in the past. He claimed that in an unspecified antiquity, “when the people had just arisen,” there was a beastlike war of all against all, which ended only when “the worthiest and the most able [man] in All-under-Heaven” was established as Son of Heaven, creating thereafter a perfectly centralized and uniformly ruled universal state. 16 Mozi’s audience may well have understood that his narrative “invoked the past to serve the present”: this political myth aimed to demonstrate that unification was the only way out of current disorder and devastating mutual strife.
    Whereas Confucius and Mozi embedded their quest for unity in appeals to the past (either the early Zhou or some unspecified primeval age), other thinkers proposed alternative justifications for the unification of the realm. Thus an exceptionally influential fourth-century BCE text, the Laozi , provides metaphysical underpinnings for political unification. Just as the universe is ruled by the uniform and all-penetrating force of the Way ( Dao ), so should society be unified under a single omnipotent leader. These ideas appear in the Laozi in a nascent form, but they were duly developed in later texts that utilized them to buttress the need for unity and also to lionize the future ruler of the unified realm to superhuman proportions (on which see chapter 2). 17 Yet intellectually engaging as they are, these and other philosophical justifications of unity mattered little
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for the evolution of the drive for unification in the second half of the Warring States period. The more devastating the interstate warfare became, the clearer it was that unity was needed not just because of historical precedents or metaphysical constructs but primarily as the only means of avoiding further bloodshed. This understanding is vivid in the following dialogue between one of the most important followers of Confucius, Mengzi (Mencius, ca. 380–304 BCE), and one of the regional kings:
[The king] asked: “How can All-under-Heaven be stabilized?”
[Mengzi] answered: “Stability is in unity.”
—“Who is able to unify it?”
[Mengzi] answered: “He, who has no proclivity to kill, is able to
unify it.”
—“Who will be able to follow him?”
[Mengzi] answered: “Nobody under Heaven will not follow him.
… If there is [a ruler] who has no proclivity to kill, then the people of
All-under-Heaven will crane their necks looking at him. If this really
happens, the people will go over to him as water runs downward: who
will be able to stop this torrent?” 18
    Mengzi’s dictum, “Stability is in unity,” may be considered the common motto of the intellectual discourse of the Warring States period; but his moralistic idealism—expressed in the belief that only a benevolent and nonmilitaristic ruler, “who has no proclivity to kill,” would attain final unification—was pathetically naive. It was duly rejected by some: for instance, Mengzi’s elder contemporary and ideological antipode, Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE), argued that unity can be attained only through resolute and merciless military action against rival rulers. Shang Yang was notorious in his advocacy of attaining victory through “performing whatever the enemy is ashamed of.” 19 Yet blatantly militaristic Shang Yang and radically moralistic Mengzi, who considered aggressive war a